Scientists just built a car engine for quantum computers, except it's smaller than a grain of sand and runs colder than outer space. Quantum computers have to run near absolute zero, but every qubit still needs to talk to room-temperature electronics. That means a forest of physical cables, and it's a huge part of why scaling quantum computers up is so hard. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland, led by Professor Mikko Möttönen, built the first cyclic quantum heat engine ever made inside a superconducting circuit. At the center of it is a transmon qubit, a basic building block of quantum computing, hooked up to a tiny refrigerator that can both heat and cool it on demand. Sources:     •    Uusnäkki, Mörstedt, Teixeira, Rasola & Möttönen, "Initial demonstration of a quantum heat engine based on dissipation-engineered superconducting circuits," Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72651-x     •    Aalto University press release: aalto.fi/en/news/worlds-first-superconducting-quantum-heat-engine-opens-the-path-to-larger-quantum-computers